


cookies

by DarlaBlack



Category: The X-Files
Genre: Angst, Episode: s08e16 Three Words, F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-03-26
Updated: 2019-03-26
Packaged: 2019-12-18 04:03:16
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 534
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18242000
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/DarlaBlack/pseuds/DarlaBlack
Summary: mulder goes shopping





	cookies

He’s in the grocery store and he’s not sure what to do. There’s no food in his apartment, which doesn’t feel like home anyway. He picks up a loaf of bread, six eggs, a jar of peanut butter. This is food that people eat, right? He buys waffles.

He thinks of Scully: her stoic face, but the tears that hovered when he told her he was sorry, how she nearly choked on her disappointment in him before she managed to swallow it. He sensed in himself only vague shame and wasn’t able to look her in the eye. He said he was happy for her, but that isn’t true because he can’t feel happy, or any other way. He feels only the chill in his veins (cold like cemetery mud in January), and panic. There’s always panic. He teeters at the edge of screaming terror that oscillates into flat unfeeling at all moments of the day. Into the cart goes a bottle of soy sauce, a can of beans.

Under the light of eye-stinging fluorescence, he wanders, finds himself standing before a wall of unfamiliar objects: sippy cups and diapers and pacifiers and formula. It is a curious world, this sea of pastel and powder-scented things. He’s not sure how he got here, or why. He reaches out two fingers and touches a cotton bib adorned with yellow ducks. Then he turns and moves on before he can think about ducks or cotton or small mouths that require pacifying.

In the snack aisle he buys some dip, and, staring at sourdough pretzels, realizes he’s been here for almost an hour. He looks down at his shoes, which suddenly seem too large for his feet. He wiggles his toes. Unbidden, a memory comes: he and Scully in a motel room with junk food dumped out on the bed, how happy she was to see a yellow pack of pecan sandies.  _I haven’t had these since I was a kid_ , she said. In a sugar coma after, she hooked her arm over the waist of his white undershirt and fell asleep on his shoulder.He kept the memory of her love of those cookies somewhere inside him, and it leaks out now, warming some tiny piece of his spine, his belly, his heart perhaps. He finds the packaging here and slips them into his basket, which pulls down on the crook of his elbow with the weight of his myriad selections.

In his apartment he eats two of the sandies while perched on the edge of his couch in the near dark. He examines their flavor like evidence. He licks his lips and tries to remember the taste of her sugar-dusted mouth, or at least the sound of her laugh. He keeps them on his coffee table, as if a lure or a bargaining chip. She will come and he will give them to her and watch her smile, and maybe she will hook her arm over him again and they will again be themselves. He will feel something then, he is sure.

So he eats a third cookie before sealing the bag, and he turns on the television, and he waits for her to come.


End file.
